About Me

Friday, May 18, 2012

Tea and Memeories

My daughter recently said to me, "I don't know what I would do if I couldn't drink my tea!" She really loves her tea. Just any ole tea won't do. Has to be special leaves, special brews, soy with raw honey, green tea. She drinks it hot, cold, and all day long. Sometimes those who love her have to wait. We wait while she fixes or finds the perfect tea.

I have lots of tea memeories. Iced tea was and absolute in the summer on the farm. Iced tea and Kool Aid. No sugar in the iced tea. Salt on the watermelon, but no sugar in the iced tea. Now in the winter, lots of sugar in the hot tea. Those were just the tea rules. We didn't have fancy stuff, but I remember when mom first brought home Lipton tea bags. We thought we had gotten real modern.

In the summer, during my childhood, most nights, we had dinner out on the front yard. The colorful aluminum pitcher was always full of iced tea. And we all had our special color aluminum glass from the set. We would take the food out to the picnic table and enjoy the summer nights. The farmwork was done for the day. Hay and been mown, or corn picked. It smelled like a job well done. It's a bit of a stretch to say that we had dinner together, because my brothers and I were almost immediately up in the big cottonwood tree, swinging on ropes high enough to kill us quick if we had fallen, and grabbing a bite to eat with each swoop from the top. My parents sat on the big white wooden chairs looking proud and amazingly enough not yelling things like, "be careful," "don't go too high," or any of the many warnings a parent would surely be thinking. I've wondered how they kept their restraint. "Me Tarzan, You Jane" was the game of summer choice. Funny how thinking about iced tea can bring out those memories.

I don't drink much tea. My drink of choice is coffee or water. But, I'm starting to get into it. Watching my daughter's delight when it's the perfect brew and hearing her talk of the health benefits in her green tea mixture. I'm starting to get it. Part of the joy of a perfect brew is just taking time to enjoy it. Sipping it slowly, talking about how wonderful it is, breathing in the warm air it creates and letting the body slip, every so slowly, into another moment, maybe a memory, maybe a dream, but a moment that can be savored, if only briefly. No wonder my daughter just can't imagine a day without her tea.